Last updated on 2024-12-09
Chapter 52: Crossing
The map made the route look simple: left at the northwest edge of Lake Suoyarvi, left again just past Vegarus, the only marked village, about a third of the way up, then left at each fork beyond. Just stay left, Rudy told himself. There are no right turns. Hope for signs, and count the kilometers: 95 to Finland, the map had said, so the odometer should spin to about 50050, halfway through its third trip around.
Loggers had cleared a lot of the road north from Suoyarvi along the lake. Rudy and Ksenia could see the lake islands, still heavily wooded, dotted with cabins along their shores. The forest thickened and crowded the road when they turned west toward Vegarus—gambling capital of Karelia! Rudy imagined, but they were already gambling by riding up this road alone toward the rain. And Vegarus had no casino, no gas pump, no roadside shop, just a dozen houses in sight of the road and one sign alleging a hotel but pointing up a dirt road toward two shacks that hadn’t seen paint since Khrushchev.
Past Vegarus, the road was nothing but gravel and trees and mosquitoes. The gravel remained well-packed, with just a few loose patches. Rudy pushed close to 100 on smooth straightaways, but not often. Every speed felt faster with the trees close to the edge of the road, and there was little room to slide if they hit washboard or soft washout or if an oncoming truck surprised them around a bend.
“You know,” Rudy said over his helmet mic, trying to ease the tension,
“we could stop any time. We could take that logging road, disappear, live in the woods. We could find a cabin—I could build a cabin. We could catch fish, collect nuts and berries and roots. I would find a rifle and shoot deer for you. We would be harder to find here than in Helsinki, or Paris, or wherever we are going.”
“You see the bugs on your helmet, right?”
Rudy certainly saw the bugs. Every now and then they hit clouds of bugs that felt like rain on his sleeve. “We’ll get used to them,” Rudy said, “grow thick skins, like good Russians. Imagine the old partisans we would find as neighbors, or the grandchildren of tsarists, or dissidents who fled and never came back.”
“Yes, maybe some old Sakharovists who haven’t heard the Union collapsed. We knock and they pop out of their hatches and ask us what happened. We tell them about Putin, and they go right back into their dugouts.”
Rudy scanned the road again—flat, smooth, solid tracks as far as he could see to the next bend in the road. He looked around at the unbroken forest under the rumpled gray sky. “There is still far more of Russia than Putin or any police can manage. There is still more Russia that we could make our home than would make us prisoner.”
Ksenia leaned closer to him. “I will go with you to the forest, the mountains, the desert, wherever we must, to live. But the forest here, or in Siberia, or anywhere in Russia would be our prison. We could walk in the woods forever, but we would have to stop before Suoyarvi, or Murmansk, or Archangelsk. Putin wants us dead. He’ll put a bounty on us. We show our faces in the city, even the small city, and any number of Fedyas in Buy would jump at the chance to rub us out and claim the bounty. The goons in other countries will care far less about us; the police in Europe will care far less about investigating Russian warrants for fugitives; beyond Europe, the police will care not at all.” Ksenia pointed up the road. “Freedom is that way. And fewer bugs.”
The bugs went away when the rain came. Just ten klicks from the border, Rudy guessed from the odometer, a curtain of water dropped hard and fast, turning the forest and the road to a gray mystery. The road turned slick and soft, and safe speed dropped to 50, 40, 30. Rudy strained to see safe stretches where he could take one hand from the handlebar and wipe the raindrops and bug grime off his visor. Ksenia pressed closer, ducking out of the rain as much as she could behind him. Her weight helped with traction, but slowing down made it harder to balance.
They did not speak now; Rudy’s attention was entirely on the machine, their balance, and the possibility that some other knucklehead would be out in this rain, in a bigger vehicle, plowing toward them from ahead or behind, not taking the road as cautiously as they were. He wasn’t sure he’d hear a car coming—the rain drummed on every leaf, filling the forest with a high rush that drowned out the rumble of his engine.
Then came that knucklehead, a logging truck, no lights, cutting around the curve ahead onto their side of the road. The rear, loaded with a tightly chained bundle of a couple dozen massive logs, swayed and shook behind the better-suspended tractor. Rudy leaned right, past the edge of the gravel, into the dirt and brush. The truck roared past, spraying them with a wet blanket of road grit. Blinded, Rudy leaned back toward the roadway. There was a pop, a jerk, and they were on the ground.
Rudy tried to scramble immediately to his feet, but he felt pinned. He realized it wasn’t the bike that kept him from moving but Ksenia. They’d both been thrown and slid along the gravel, but she’d kept her grip on him. Her arms now seemed frozen around his chest, and her legs were on top of his. “Ksenia!” he shouted, struggling to reach and open his visor, turning his head but unable to see her. “Ksenia! Are you o.k.?” A bit roughly, he tried prying her left arm from his chest. She fought him at first, reflexively pulling herself more tightly to him. “Ksenia! Go! Off the road.” She stopped resisting and joined him in scrambling blindly off the gravel.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, looking over her scuffed boots, the scratched and muddied side of her dark green rain gear, her dark and intact helmet.
Ksenia’s helmet nodded. “You?”
“Don’t think so.” Rudy got up. His ribs and right shoulder ached, but his legs held.
The bike lay on its side a couple meters behind them, rain steaming up from the silent engine. The rear tire was flat. The right saddlebag, the one with Ksenia’s extra clothes, was ripped from the rack and lay behind the bike in the mud.
Before he could inspect the bike further, he heard a crash, muffled by the rain and the trees, back up the road around the last bend. Was that logging truck trying to kill everyone?
He righted the motorcycle and rolled it, laboriously on the popped rear tire, to lean against a tree. He took off his helmet and hung it on the left handlebar. The right handlebar had dragged through the mud and pulled the bar off center. “Check the bags, look around, make sure nothing fell out, especially my tools. I’ll go see what happened back there.” Ksenia didn’t need to explain why going back was a bad idea; Rudy recited and ignored all the cautions to himself as he trotted back—can’t lose any more time, can’t offer any help on a motorcycle with a bum tire, certainly can’t stick around for police to arrive… not that he imagined police showing up out here any time soon, or anyone’s phone getting signal to call the police.
Through the rain, the rear of the logging truck came into view. It sat diagonally across the road. The chains had snapped, and several logs had broken free, some splayed across the ground, a couple still propped slantwise, front ends still up on the truck. A big black SUV lay smoking and crumpled against the big truck’s engine. A man in a red track suit was yanking at the driver’s door of the big—
On instinct, Rudy dove to the ditch to hide. Peering over the roadbed, Rudy saw the red track suit, the square shoulders, the long arms… and now the voice, a stream of obscenity and rage—it was Fedya, the goon from MOTO-CAMPING. Unable to wrench the door open—maybe it was locked by the fearful driver, or maybe it was bent and jammed from the impact—Fedya pulled out his pistol fired a shot in the air.
Rudy ducked again, sliding back to the trees for more cover. He unzipped his jackets, rain jacket and leather beneath, and pulled out the pistol he’d taken from the Chechen last night. Wiping rain from his eyes, Rudy looked closely at the safety and made sure he switched it the right way, off, ready to fire.
Rudy heard a bang—not a gunshot, but metal on metal. He peered around a birch trunk and saw the driver had kicked his door open. He threw something at Fedya. The gangster ducked, the driver leapt, and the two men fell to the ground in an angry clinch. They scuffled, splashed, cursed. Rudy couldn’t see where Fedya’s gun had fallen; neither, he hoped, could Fedya.
Behind the wrestling match, another man, wearing a dark suit, came around the wrecked SUV. One hand pressed to his forehead, the man, Fedya’s partner, Rudy guessed, staggered and tried to prop himself against the wreck of the black vehicle. He groaned something that neither Fedya nor the driver noticed. Fedya’s partner collapsed to a kneeling position by the rear tire, then fell sideways and did not move again, at least not while Rudy was watching.
How can this be? Rudy wondered. Fedya, all the way from Buy, here? Ksenia had mentioned a bounty. Did the FSB put Ksenia’s face on the news? Did they send her picture to the gangs that already worked for Putin? Of all the cops and thugs whose path they might have crossed on this hard day’s ride, how was Fedya the one who could track them?
Whatever combination of luck and testosterone brought him here, Fedya was rolling in the middle of this road, and the log driver who’d almost killed Rudy and Ksenia was now their best defense.
Let them fight, Rudy thought. Let them wear each other down. Give us more time to fix the bike and get going.
Straighten the handlebars, plug the rear tire, whale on the foot pump—he could get the bike rolling again in maybe five minutes, if there was no other damage. But they’d be sitting out in the open. Ksenia would have to stand guard… and then what? if the fight broke up, if Fedya spotted them, or if his injured friend regained consciousness and produced another gun… what then? If Rudy could get a bead on Fedya from the ditch, he could put an end to their danger… unless Fedya’s partner came to, or unless the driver turned on them, or unless he missed and Fedya was a better shot.
Rudy decided to go with his core skills. He crawled backward, keeping his eye on the fighting men, who still grunted and kicked and splashed on the road. Fedya occasionally shouted for his inert friend, but both men now mostly saved their breath for strength as they struggled for an upper hand. When Rudy had backed away far enough that the rain made it hard to make out who was winning the fight, he stuffed the pistol back in his jacket, jumped to his feet, and ran back the way he’d come.
Ksenia was running toward him, pistol drawn. She aimed the pistol away from him as he approached. Rudy raised both hands and waved her back. She stopped and waited for him to reach her, training her eyes and her gun behind him for whoever might be coming. Then they ran together, back to the bike. “I heard a gunshot,” she said when they stopped.
Rudy caught his breath. “Fedya. That goon from Buy. One other man. Black SUV. Followed us.”
“That can’t be,” Ksenia said. Her helmet was off, and her scarf had come loose, hanging around her wet hair behind her neck. “I looked back all the time. No tail, not out of Buy, not on the road, not on the ferry or out of Petrozavodsk. How would he…?”
“Don’t know. I didn’t see anyone, either. But—” Rudy’s head pounded, and he slumped against the tree that held up his bike.
“Rudy!” Ksenia leaned close, brushing his short hair with her free hand, looking into his eyes. “Are you o.k.?”
Rudy couldn’t tell if his wooziness was from running so hard, or the crash, or…well, everything. He grabbed Ksenia’s hand, closed his eyes, and took three long, deep breaths. He felt his balance return. Ksenia was looking right into his eyes. Rudy nodded.
“Then…” Ksenia looked up and down the road. “Then we must keep moving. Do we walk?”
“No,” he said, leaning the motorcycle onto its side again. “I can fix this. But… you’ll have to watch. If Fedya comes….”
Ksenia understood the tactical situation as well as Rudy. She crouched on one knee behind their bike, pistol out, gripped in both hands, arms resting on her leg. Rudy dug out his flat kit and foot pump, then laid the bike down so he could move the wheel freely. The puncture in the rear was obvious: a sharp twig was sticking out. He pulled the twig and rasped out the hole. He coated the thickest plug in his kit, a short red rubber rope, with rubber cement and jammed it into the tire. He pumped the rear tire halfway up, then let it sit to test the seal. He smeared rain water from his hand around the seal and saw one slow bubble, then another. He let the air out, worked the rubber and the plug with his hand, and pumped the tire up again. The seal held better, but he didn’t like it, and he didn’t like the prospect of jouncing it around on rough gravel again.
But it would have to do. He spun the rear tire to put the patch toward the top. Then, grunting, he stood the bike up. The seal did not bubble or hiss. He leaned on the seat, testing for weight—still no obvious trouble. Leaning the bike on the tree again, he gave the rear tire a few more pounds, though still about a quarter shy of regular road full. Go easy on the patch, get a little more traction on loose gravel. Rudy wouldn’t take them anywhere near highway speed. He checked the odometer: 50042.2—maybe nine kilometers to go. Go 50, maybe ten minutes. Go easy, but go.
“Fixed?” Ksenia asked over her shoulder. She had not moved.
“Tire, yes. Now handlebars…” Rudy put the plugs and pump back in the saddlebag and fished out his crescent wrench. He loosened the main nut, centered the bars, and tightened them in place. He brushed some grit from the torn rubber throttle handle. The cables were fine. “Anyone coming?”
Ksenia’s eyes and pistol remained fixed on the road behind them. “No one.”
Ksenia had picked the saddlebag up out of the road and set it by a tree. Rudy reattached it to the rack with three plastic zip ties. Then he put on his headset and helmet. When he handed Ksenia her helmet, she did not take it immediately. “Hold my gun,” she said. “Watch.” Rudy set her helmet sideways on the ground. Without turning the barrel away from the road behind them, Ksenia transferred the pistol to Rudy’s hand, then retied her scarf and pulled her helmet back on.
“Check, check,” he heard over his headset. He checked back. Ksenia came beside him, put her hand gently on his arm, and took the gun from his hand. “Let’s go,” she said, thunking her helmet gently against his but keeping her aim on the bend in the road. Rudy mounted the bike and stepped on the kickstart. The engine popped to life, a little smoky but otherwise unaffected by the spill. Rudy checked both sides of the engine—no signs of leaks or anything else amiss. Then Ksenia hopped on, putting her pistol in an outside pocket of her rain jacket and sealing herself close to him, cozy as a blanket. “Get us out of here,” she said over the mic. Rudy gently throttled up, keeping the noise down, watching his mirror for trouble. The rear tire held, the curve disappeared behind them, and they were off.
For a few minutes, they were both too tense to speak. Rudy constantly checked the road, and the mirror. The deep puddles in the hard-packed ruts and the looser gravel beside those main trucks all tried to pull the bike off course. It was tough to tell how much of the loose ride was from the tricky ground and how much was from the rear tire losing air. Ksenia’s legs beside his kept him from getting a good look at the rear tread.
The bike slipped and splashed into a long wet rut. Rudy wrestled with the handlebars. Ksenia held on, never constricting his necessary movements, and moving naturally with him, helping keep their balance as he steered them out of the ankle-deep water. They were only going 20, 25, but the bike was still going.
“I can’t believe,” Rudy finally said… but he needed a moment to shake the tension out of his right hand, then his left. “I can’t believe that you don’t ride.”
“I just never… I didn’t have….” The road smoothed out for a bit, so it seemed strange Ksenia couldn’t finish the thought. Then she asked, “So you remember a Sophie B. Hawkins song from the summer you came to Suzdal?”
Given the unexpected nature of Ksenia’s question and the concentration the road still required, Rudy didn’t think he had the mental energy to remember any song from the radio from that specific summer. “No. Why?”
The bike splashed over a washboard. Ksenia waited for the gravel to sooth out. “Western songs were all over the radio that summer. Yulia taped that one from the radio. Damn, she says, right in the title. Yulia and I listened to it every night in Suzdal. We thought we were such rebels. When you Americans came, Yulia and I made lyrics about you, Ken, Lily, Constance, breaking concrete, hauling debris. The words just came out, English and Russian, perfectly in rhythm. We sang our version in our dorm and laughed to tears. We thought we would sing it for you all at campfire, but Yulia’s tape broke, and we were too shy to sing without music.
“When you and I rode to Galich that next day, I heard that song in my head the entire way, radio version, Yulia’s version. When we sang on the lake, on the mountaintop, I thought about singing it to you, but… we were singing together, our Russian songs. I didn’t want to interrupt….”
“Hang on,” Rudy said. They were coming up on a small washout. Rudy slowed to a crawl and eased the bike over a narrow rocky gap in the gravel surface.
Ksenia waited another minute before speaking again. “After you left, I could not listen to the song. On rare occasions when the radio played it, I would switch it off. And I told myself I would not sing it again.
“Motorcycle was like that. I just could not… would not ride by myself. Or with anyone else.”
Ksenia started tapping a beat on Rudy’s chest. She hummed softly, then began singing softly. It was that song, but about Rudy, and Ken, breaking concrete. She substituted silly Russian swear words and wished musically for jackhammers and steam shovels and other big equipment.
Then came a verse about the bell tower, the fields and forests and far horizon, the ride to Galich, the lake and their “mountaintop”. That couldn’t have been part of what she and Yulia sang during their week working together. Ksenia had made up her own verse, and a new chorus, preserving the American damn, but wishing she could ride forever, on every road in Russia, with him.
Every word came smoothly, as if 20 years were just a good night’s sleep, as if there were no rain, no Fedya, no FSB, no guns in their pockets…
The rain got harder. Water pooled and covered over half the road. Rudy picked their way along visible gravel, weaving across rippling puddles which now joined into streams. A yellow sign loomed up from the right: “Border Area—Stay on Road—Armed Patrols” in Russian, Finnish, and English. Ksenia stopped singing. Trees were cleared from both sides of the road, but in the now-pouring rain, they couldn’t see the border gate and guards, and the guards couldn’t see them, until they were almost upon it. Lights pierced the gray gloom first, but as they rode closer, Rudy realized those lights were far back, maybe half a kilometer away, past the border, at the Finnish station. The Russian post was closer, of course, but unlit, a dark canvas-covered truck parked beside a red and white swing-arm gate covering the gap in chain link and razor wire.
Before he could make out any human movement, he heard a pop and a high whistle piercing the drum of the rain. Rudy let off the gas immediately. He could feel the rear wheel slopping around worse and worse. The tire gave its last whistle as he braked to a stop maybe a hundred meters from the gate.
Ksenia hopped off immediately. Twisting around, Rudy could see the rear tire was flat. The whistle suggested the plug had given way just a little, but it wouldn’t get any better. They’d need a new tire to go any farther.
Rudy got off. He wanted to kick the tire, kick the machine—it had gotten them this far; why not just a kilometer more, a minute more?
With a growl, he clamped his hands on the handlebars and started pushing toward the checkpoint.
“Rudy, wait!” Ksenia ran awkwardly through the mud to get in front of the bike.
“What?” he asked sharply, still leaning into the handlebars. “We’re almost—”
Ksenia shushed him and reached into her pocket. She pulled out her pistol and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t see anyone behind us,” she said. “We should get rid of these.” Holding the pistol close to her chest, she ejected the clip. She dropped ammunition and weapon between their boots. Then she fished the pistol from his jacket and knelt beside the flat tire. She separated his gun and clip and pulled the spare clips from her own jacket. She set them all on the ground, then got up and put on a show of frustration. She kicked the tire, kicked the gravel, kicked the rain… and kicked their weapons off the road, into the brush.
Then she leaned into the seat rack. “O.K. Now push.” They both heaved against the bike and got it rolling toward the border.
Ahead, a guard in a rain hat and poncho stepped out of the small cabin by the gate. A rifle hung behind his right shoulder. Rudy saw behind him another guard, a stockier man, sitting in the dark next to an open window, holding a rifle across his chest. When they got a few meters away, the outside guard raised one hand and stepped forward. His hands were bare and bony, his face stubbly and narrow, but his bright, clear eyes showed an interest beyond dutiful border alertness. He looked younger than Ksenia.
“Going to Finland the hard way?” the guard asked. He glanced at Rudy and Ksenia before his eyes settled on making a more thorough inspection of the bike.
Rudy removed his helmet so he could deal with the guard face to face. “Not on this tire. Flat. Plugged it, didn’t hold.”
“Shame. Can’t help. No spares here. We don’t even have power. Generator’s out, can’t check anyone through.”
Ksenia popped up her visor. She and Rudy shared a nervous glance, no different, Rudy hoped, from the glance any traveling couple might share, having ridden this far, only to find their planned route to Finland was closed. Disappointment and unease here wouldn’t give them away as illegal migrants or enemies of the state.
But Rudy sensed an opening. “Generator,” he said. “Out of fuel?”
“No, plenty of diesel, for that and our truck. Generator just won’t turn over.”
Rudy looked around the guard cabin and caught the eye of the bigger man at the window. “Mind if I take a look? I do repairs.”
“We’ve tried,” said the guard outside. “But sure.” He extended a hand, inviting Rudy to step toward the cabin. Rudy accepted the invitation, walking toward the gate. “Left,” the guard said, “around back.” Right around the side of the building, under a corrugated tin canopy clattering in the rain, sat a small diesel generator, a newer German model, red paint still shiny.
“We sent our other two guys to town yesterday,” the guard said behind Rudy. Rudy guessed he referred to Suoyarvi, the last place they’d passed that seemed to have any active commerce. “No replacements available. Our phone line is good, but command can’t requisition anything for us. Our brother Finns just laugh at us.”
Rudy crawled under the canopy, wiped the rain from his face, and checked the fuel tank and the oil. Both levels were fine. The electric start engaged, plenty of juice in the battery, but the engine wasn’t firing. “Ksenia!” he leaned out into the rain to shout around the corner of the building. “Can you bring me my tools?” After a few moments of his feeling around in the motor to check connections, Ksenia appeared beside the guard, who was kneeling and watching with interest. Ksenia handed Rudy his crescent wrench and the black canvas roll with some smaller wrenches, drivers, and other tools. Rudy unrolled the pack on the dry ground under the generator. Rudy went down his mental list, freeing and reinstalling parts, testing the starter sparingly to save battery (though if he drained it, he would ask for cables and try jumping it from the bike). The guard squatted next to the canopy, watching Rudy work. Ksenia paced between the generator and the bike, using the walk to hide her careful attention to the road behind them. Rudy worked quickly.
“Ah! Look at this,” Rudy said, holding the carburetor bowl out to the guard. “See all the crap in there? Clogged, I bet.” He wiped grit from the bowl with his fingers. He pointed his flashlight up into the carburetor and gave the interior the same rough cleaning. He blew into the valve—”Not good, but maybe enough for now”—then reassembled the device and hit the switch. The generator cranked, coughed, and rattled to life.
Rudy rolled up his tools and crawled out into the rain again. Around the corner, they saw the big light over the gate flicker and warm up to a white glow. And through the rain, over the drone of the generator, a cheer rose from the Finnish post up the road. The guard inside switched on a lamp. The light showed him to be a few years older than his partner, closer to Rudy’s age. The older guard kept his eyes on the two visitors and his hands on his rifle.
“Outstanding!” the guard in the rain cried. “Thank you, brother!”
“That’s my husband,” Ksenia said, returning from the motorcycle. “He can fix anything.”
The guard nodded up a trail toward a building at the edge of the cleared forest. “Want to come up to the barracks, fix the water heater?”
Rudy actually thought about it, one more bit of service to the country now determined to kill him and Ksenia, but a look from Ksenia cemented in his priorities the need to move, to somehow cross this last half-kilometer to safety. “I’d love to, but that tire already has us late for our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon!” the guard shouted to his comrade in the cabin. He turned again to the visitors. “All happiness to you, and many children! Got your papers?”
“Thanks, but there’s another thing. Bandits grabbed our stuff in Pitkyaranta—” Rudy remembered the town from the sign where they’d headed north from Suoyarvi to Vegarus. “All we have left is her passport and the bike. We spent all afternoon just trying to find a clerk and priest to reissue our marriage certificate. We were hoping….”
The young guard looked them both up and down one more time. He looked up at the light and the strings of rain shimmering down from it. “Come, out of the rain.” They marched into the guard post, Rudy with his roll of tools still in his hands. He and Ksenia had to stand close together while the guard squeezed past them to get behind the counter. The space was as cold and clammy as the outdoors. The young guard switched on an electric heater and a lamp atop a file cabinet. The other guard scowled at them, then leaned his rifle against his chair and turned his eyes back to the window and the road.
The young guard asked to see Ksenia’s passport and the marriage certificate and gave both only a brief glance. Then he slapped a couple forms on a clipboard and ran down a list of standard questions as he checked boxes and filled lines with a very quick hand. “Any weapons, knives, machine guns?”
“Nothing but my tools,” Rudy said, rattling the pack a bit, then pointing it toward Ksenia. “She’s all the protection I need.”
For a telescoping second, the young guard’s expression remained fixed in bureaucratic humorlessness ingrained by a thousand passes through procedure. Then he blinked and laughed, lengthily, as he checked off six more boxes and spun the clipboard around to show Rudy where to sign. One snort broke through the older guard’s scowl.
“This pass should get you through,” the younger guard said.
Rudy signed his new name and slid the clipboard back to the guard. The guard stamped the sheet and its carbons, kept the white and pink copies and handed Rudy the yellow. He stamped Ksenia’s passport, tucked the marriage certificate inside, and slid the documents to her.
Ksenia and Rudy both thanked the guard. “Thank you,” he replied, patting the heater, which had warmed up quickly. “Now Pyotr won’t be trying to climb into my bunk to stay warm.” More laughter, one more snort, and the younger guard escorted them back outside.
“The Finns won’t have a generator for you to fix,” the guard said quietly to Rudy. “They give us soldiers hell, but they’re really a sympathetic bunch. Play it cool, and they’ll let you through.”
Ksenia walked to the bike. “Again we push?”
Rudy stopped a few paces short. Roads and towns and forests and lakes and steppes and deserts flashed through his mind. 250,050 kilometers, less than one percent of them, the first few hundred and the last 1,500, with Ksenia, every one on Russian concrete, asphalt, gravel, mud. But now he, and Ksenia, could move faster without that bike than with.
Rudy stepped forward and put a hand on the green gas tank. The rain had eased while they were inside, but drops still pattered against the metal.
He pulled out a wire snippers, cut the zip ties to release the damaged saddlebag, and slung both of the bags over his shoulder. He pulled the key from the ignition and handed it to the astonished guard. “Here,” Rudy said. “It’s yours. New tire is up to you.”
The guard took the key with an unsteady hand and looked like he would have abandoned his post and gone roaring up to taunt his brother Finns if that tire hadn’t been flat. Ksenia, too, looked a little shocked. “It’s all right,” Rudy said quietly. “I’m here to get you across, not a machine.” She hung her helmet on the left handlebar, opposite Rudy’s dangling from the right. Rudy took her gloved hand—he could feel her new birch ring under the thin leather—and led her to the gate. They ducked under it and began walking toward Finland.
Ten steps later, Rudy heard an engine far behind them. He and Ksenia looked at the same time. Through the slackening rain, Rudy saw the green logging truck entering the border clearing. The bumper stuck up and out like a dark cigarette under a thin mustache of a few broken pieces of the grille. Behind the windshield, Rudy could make out a driver in red.
Rudy and Ksenia had nowhere to hide: the forest had been cleared over a hundred meters from either side of the road. The Finns were surely watching their approach—a lone guard had already stepped out of the Finnish post and appeared to be surveying the oncomers with binoculars.
“Do we run?” Rudy asked.
The truck started honking. The younger Russian guard was pushing Rudy’s motorcycle away from the gate. The older guard stepped outside, rifle in hand.
“Not yet,” Ksenia said. “We’re just two friendly honeymooners with nothing to fear.” She looked ahead and waved to the Finnish guard. Maybe the guard could see Ksenia’s smile in his binoculars. Rudy certainly could—stray dark hairs followed the rain out from under her damp headscarf down her cheek, but her smile was sunny, showing nothing but eagerness to meet new friends.
Behind them they heard the truck engine gear down and idle roughly. They heard Fedya’s voice, the words indistinct at first but the tone clear, menacing, desperately angry. Rudy resisted the urge to look back—keep walking, cover the distance, get to the Finns, who might or might not let them through but would surely not let through a raving Fedya driving a truck he’d stolen from a man he may have beaten to death.
Fedya’s words sharpened over the idling engine. “…mafia… stole my motorcycle…beat up…” Rudy got the impression Fedya wasn’t good at making up stories, certainly not good enough for the Russian guards. He heard the younger guard asking Fedya to shut off the truck and step down to talk.
Then the engine growled up and there was shouting and a loud metallic groan. Rudy had to look back. The older guard was getting up from the ground, and he and his partner were both raising their rifles. The logging truck was pushing through the red and white bar at the gate, which clung tenaciously to its post and, rather than snapping off, pulled a section of chain link fence and some siding from the Russian guard cabin with it. Even with its trailer gone, the logging truck didn’t accelerate fast. Fedya was grinding the gears, struggling to find second.
Ksenia tugged Rudy’s hand. “Now we run,” she said.
Rudy heard gunshots. He hoped it was the Russian guards, and he hoped they were aiming tightly at the truck’s tires and not just generally up the road. Ksenia pumped her arms and legs, churning madly over the slippery gravel. Rudy kept himself two steps behind Ksenia, between her and whatever fire might come their way. He pumped one arm while clutching his saddlebags with the other. The truck was still moving, grinding closer.
They closed the distance to the Finns. A second guard had stepped outside to watch the spectacle from behind their own red-bar gate. The first guard—Rudy could see now that she was a woman with regulation-bobbed blonde hair beneath her cap—had lowered her binoculars; both guards had raised their rifles, but they weren’t aiming yet. The female guard shouted something in Finnish, then, in Russian: “Russians?”
“Russians!” Ksenia shouted back.
“Do you need asylum?” The guard shouted emphatically in Russian, making clear the key word she and her partner needed to hear to determine their intervention.
“Yes!” Ksenia shouted back. “Asylum! Asylum!”
“Down! Down! Down!” the guard ordered as she and her partner shouldered their rifles and aimed down the road. Ksenia and Rudy dropped to the gravel. The two Finns opened fire. Ksenia kept scrambling, forward and away from the line of fire, over gravel and through grass to the fence near the gate. Rudy instinctively followed and covered her, his head down next to hers. Under the rifle fire, he heard boots crunching. A mighty hand clamped onto his jacket and pulled. Rudy couldn’t resist. The bags fell from his shoulder. Another hand hooked Ksenia’s arm and hoisted her from the ground. It was a third Finnish guard pulling them both under the border gate. Rudy and Ksenia flailed along, trying to keep up, until the third guard had pulled them behind the firing guards and a concrete barrier.
Rudy and Ksenia held onto each other, unable to see what was happening. They heard a break in the gunfire. The woman shouted. The truck continued to growl closer. The Finns resumed fire, emptying their magazines, reloading, firing again. Tires popped, glass shattered, something mechanical went loose and wild, and the engine stopped.
The third guard, the towering Finn who had pulled them across, stood over them with a pistol ready at his side. He glanced down at them, shouted something in Finnish to his comrades, then stepped out to where Rudy’s bags had fallen at the edge of the gravel. The guard kicked each bag gently. A protein bar spilled out of one bag. The guard bent down, unstrapped the covers, and shook loose a few more contents. Apparently satisfied the bags were just bags, the guard followed his pistol toward the truck, which had stopped about 30 meters from the Finnish gate. The other male guard approached the truck from the other side, rifle trained on the shattered windshield. The two advancing guards shouted back and forth in Finnish. The female guard remained behind the gate, splitting her attention between the truck and the two refugees beside her. “Stay down,” she said to Rudy and Ksenia in Russian. “Don’t move.”
Head sideways on his arm, Rudy peered around the concrete barrier to watch the guards advance on the broken truck. Both front wheels were flat. The windshield held but was shattered around six distinct bullet holes, five on the driver’s side. He couldn’t see past the thick white veins in the glass. The bigger guard barked at the driver in Russian—”hands up!”—then yanked open the driver’s door and stepped back, rifle ready. After just a couple seconds, he shouted to his partners in Finnish, lowered his rifle, and climbed up on the tank. The second guard circled around the truck, checking the empty cargo bed.
The younger Russian guard was trotting up from his post, rifle slung behind his shoulder. He joined the two Finnish guards, now both on the driver’s side of the stilled vehicle. The Russian looked in the cab and came away looking a little woozy and spat at the truck. The guards spoke in a mix of Finnish and Russian. Overcoming his unease at the sight inside the cab, the Russian appeared to retell his view of the incident with vigorous gestures, covering Rudy and Ksenia’s appearance on the motorcycle, their flat tire, his repair of the generator, and then the truck’s wild approach and attempt to break through. The rain was coming down harder again, pounding the truck and the ground and the metal roof of the Finnish post, so Rudy caught only fragments of their conversation over the drumming and the distance—”honeymoon… truck… know his type… bullshit.”
The big Finn turned toward his post and shouted to the female guard. She looked down at the refugees and asked, “You o.k.? Didn’t take any stray gunfire from the Russians?”
Rudy realized he hadn’t heard a sound from Ksenia since they hit Finnish ground. He flipped himself over. Ksenia was right beside him, eyes wide. They looked each other over, wet, muddy, but apparently unperforated. Ksenia pulled herself tight to Rudy and pressed her cheek to his. “We’re good,” she said. “Good, good, good.”